¹Development Planning Unit, University College London, 34 Tavistock Square, London WC1H 9EZ, UK

Correspondence: Nadia Alaily-Mattar, E-mail: ninamattar@yahoo.com

Abstract

Gated communities have been criticized in the academic literature for their segregatory capacity and for accentuating social hierarchies. This paper presents a case study of spatial segregation practices in Beirut, a city in which gated communities are scarce, yet in which a severe kind of spatial segregation exists. Increasingly, after the end of the civil war in 1990 in Beirut, affluent individuals have come to produce the living spaces of their everyday life in a spatially segregated way that rejects the local and is stretched out over the totality of the city. It is possible to conceive of this stretched out segregated living space as a 'layer' that functions as an expanded form of a gated community. To affluent individuals in Beirut the neighbourhood has become an alien space with which they avoid getting in contact, while, paradoxically, the city is seen as a small neighbourly space where everyone knows everyone else. This paper concludes by pointing to the usefulness of this concept of the layer as one that illustrates how the aim of many thematic 'totalizing' urban projects particularly in the Arab region is to compress, package and commodify the expanded segregated spatiality of affluence.